With increasing developments of network and web technology, more and more end users are using their client devices or user equipments such as desktop personal computers (PCs), tablet PCs, mobile phones, personal digital assistances (PDAs) and the like to access web content. Traditionally, web content (e.g., data associated with web pages) is communicated from a web server or a cloud server to the user equipment based on transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP). As known, TCP is a connection-oriented protocol which may provide reliable, ordered delivery of a data stream. Currently TCP is the protocol used by major Internet applications such as the World Wide Web. TCP may guarantee that all bytes received will be identical with bytes sent and in the correct order. Since packet transfer is not reliable, a technique known as positive acknowledgment with retransmission is used to guarantee reliability of packet transfers. This fundamental technique of TCP requires the receiver (e.g., the user equipment) to respond with an acknowledgment message as it receives the data packet from the sender (e.g., the web server or cloud server). The sender keeps a record of each packet it sends and a timer from when the packet was sent. The sender will retransmit a packet if the timer expires before the message has been acknowledged.
Connection-oriented protocol like TCP is optimized for accurate transmission. However, it will be appreciated that when network bandwidth and/or processing capacity of the user equipment is relative low, or when some content items of the web content to be transmitted are of large size, the connection-oriented protocol would probably incur relatively long response delays (for example, in the order of seconds) while waiting for out-of-order packets or retransmissions of lost packets. In the meantime, it is found that web content items usually have different degrees of importance. That is, some content might not be very important for individual users in some situations. For example, assume a user is using his/her mobile phone to access a website of a digital book content provider. Usually a web page of such website contains some textual information such as a summary or description of the book's content as well as one or more pictures like illustrations or cover. Although those pictures may convey useful information, they are not essential parts of the web page, especially for the user who is accessing the web page using his/her mobile terminal. Traditionally, a communication based on TCP/IP is likely to take remarkable time cost to guarantee the accurate transmission of those pictures. As a result, the response time is lengthened and the user experience degrades.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need in the art for a solution capable of communicating web content more effectively and efficiently.